Upcoming events:

In the wake of nationwide protests, Big Tech companies such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook have publicly stated their "support of the Black community." On the next Techtonic, Chris Gilliard discusses his recent Fast Company piece that explains how Big Tech companies profit from exploiting and harming the very communities they claim to support.

• Dan Coats to Step Down as Intelligence Chief; Trump Picks Loyalist for Job (NYT, July 28): Coats "was vocal in defending intelligence agencies and their assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election on Mr. Trump’s behalf, and he emphasized those findings leading up to the president’s meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Helsinki, Finland, in 2018."

• Dan Coats to Step Down as Director of National Intelligence Next Month (WSJ, July 28): "Coats, who has tangled with the president over how to deal with the threat posed by Russia, is leaving his post. ... Mr. Coats has been especially critical of Moscow’s efforts to interfere in U.S. elections, which he warned in 2018 were ongoing. Russia has denied any election interference."

not to feed the trolls, but just to set the record a bit straighter: the book was a common book among white supremacists that talks about the widely debunked idea of social Darwinism. while it may talk about communist principals, it would not be accurate to characterize the book as a "book on communism"

@annie, what's so hard to understand about a white nationalist, racist, pseudo-Russian-Orthodox billionaire kleptocrat (Putin) funding nationalists and promoting intra-democratic diviseness all around the world in an attempt to tear down NATO and stop people from looking into all the money he's stashed in Panama that he's plundered from his own people? (An no this isn't just an attempt to distract from the failures of THEM DAMN NEO-LIBRULS nor does it make their failures any less significant.)

Interesting that the word 'gun' is not on the 2nd Ammendment. 'Well-regulated' however is.
I seem to remember something about LIFE - Liberty - the Pursuit of Happiness Right of Assembly & Free Speech ... one might presume w/out being shot to death or Terrorized of same...

This episode makes me think about Koch brothers building power plants for the Soviet Union and Fascist Germany as well as IBM I believe providing business machines to the Nazi Government. Profit is profit - it is not morals and not ethics.

Social engineering is not new. Tokyo Rose, right? And propaganda is not new either. It’s just all on steroids now. And Facebook and Twitter could easily indemnify fake accounts on act on them but they choose not to.

On the HBO miniseries Years & Years (kind of poor man's ongoing Black Mirror episode) there is a character that wants to "transition" to pure digital and has mods that allows her to take pictures by blinking and send them by pointing, which is just a nightmare.